Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-histories of Designs

by Alfred C. Haddon

At first the world is regarded as a great democracy; but with the growth of his knowledge man realises more clearly the vastness of nature and his own feebleness; this, however, enhances his conception of the power of those supernatural beings with which his imagination peoples the universe. If he feels himself to be so frail and slight, how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control the gigantic machinery of nature!

Thus, as his old sense of equality with gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to share with them.

With the first advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background, and sinks to the level of a black art. It is now regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence gain or lose with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant.

Throughout the whole of this slow evolution ornamental art has attempted to visualise the religious conceptions of the period. It would probably be more correct to regard the pictorial representations of religion as usually illustrating a past rather than a present aspect of belief. For a drawing, like a creed, fixes a type, and the form has a tendency to be repeated unconscious of the fact that the spirit may have burst its bonds and soared into a higher region.

Not only does the motive of religious art vary according to the stage of evolution of the religion which it illustrates, but the art itself is subject to modification as it enters into new phases of what I have termed its life-history.

Totemism is one phase of religion, but owing to its great importance in the economy of primitive peoples I have treated it in an independent section. As totemism gradually shades off into god-worship so its artistic symbolism is merged into that of divinities, but it often persists to an unexpected extent.

It is only possible for me to touch lightly on a few of the aspects of religious art from the anthropologist’s point of view.

As the gods were being evolved it was very important for men to retain the remembrance of those family ties between them and mankind which were in danger of being snapped through the length to which they were drawn and the degree of attenuation which consequently ensued.

The statements of tradition as to the descent of mortals from gods are re-enforced by the representations of artists of the unlettered races, just as they are enshrined in the written cosmogonies of more cultured folk; the main difference being that any one may understand the one if he knows the written characters, whereas the other is practically a pictograph, and requires the interpretation of the natives who have the traditional knowledge of the symbols.

We are probably justified in assuming that very early in time (and it is still widely spread among backward peoples) was the custom of carving or painting the pedigree of the man from the god—of the human from the divine. As the god is lost down the ages in the totem so too his eikon is merged into the resemblance of some animal-form. In the intermediary stage we have those monstrous forms which the enlightened pagans endeavoured to rationalise and even to spiritualise. “Yet half a beast is the great god Pan.”